Richard Kearney

Language: English

Pages: 272

ISBN: 0231147899

Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub

Has the passing of the old God paved the way for a new kind of religious project, a more responsible way to seek, sound, and love the things we call divine? Has the suspension of dogmatic certainties and presumptions opened a space in which we can encounter religious wonder anew? Situated at the split between theism and atheism, we now have the opportunity to respond in deeper, freer ways to things we cannot fathom or prove.

Distinguished philosopher Richard Kearney calls this condition ana-theos, or God after God-a moment of creative "not knowing" that signifies a break with former sureties and invites us to forge new meanings from the most ancient of wisdoms. Anatheism refers to an inaugural event that lies at the heart of every great religion, a wager between hospitality and hostility to the stranger, the other—the sense of something "more." By analyzing the roots of our own anatheistic moment, Kearney shows not only how a return to God is possible for those who seek it but also how a more liberating faith can be born.

Kearney begins by locating a turn toward sacred secularity in contemporary philosophy, focusing on Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Paul Ricoeur. He then marks "epiphanies" in the modernist masterpieces of James Joyce, Marcel Proust, and Virginia Woolf. Kearney concludes with a discussion of the role of theism and atheism in conflict and peace, confronting the distinction between sacramental and sacrificial belief or the God who gives life and the God who takes it away. Accepting that we can never be sure about God, he argues, is the only way to rediscover a hidden holiness in life and to reclaim an everyday divinity.

avoid absolutism. Looking back on my winding intellectual itinerary, I glimpse it as a set of widening circles. Brought up a Catholic in a devout but liberal Irish family, I experienced early on a deep sense of sacramental spirituality while also learning from the Protestant side of the family (my mother’s father was of Scots Presbyterian stock) that religion should be a matter of individual choice and conscience as well as of consent and mystery. This sense of double belonging was confirmed by

his omnipotence, but by virtue of his weakness and suffering. It is “religiosity,” he says, which makes one look in one’s distress to the power of God in the world: God (as) deus ex machina. The Bible directs man to God’s powerlessness and suffering; only the suffering God can help. To that extent we may say that the development towards the world’s coming of age, which has done away with a false conception of God, opens up a way of seeing the God of the Bible, who wins power and space in the

divine. { xviii } PREFACE In the third part, “Postlude,” I return to the lived universe of political and ethical action. Here I seek to apply the anatheist paradigm to certain exemplary modern figures (Gandhi, Vanier, Day) who epitomize a commitment to sacramental praxis and, second, to current debates on secularity and sacredness. All three parts hope to show how the anatheist response to the stranger may be witnessed in 1. primary lived experience, 2. poetic reexperience, and 3. a doubly

seamstress—has become Marcel’s model for writing the novel. His mundane muse. The narrator now confesses, after all, that he “should work beside her almost as she worked herself.”25 This conjecture is confirmed, I think, if we recall how Françoise is compared to Giotto’s Caritas in her being as well as her appearance (pace Swann) in the opening volume.26 Replacing the endless litany of elusive metonymic loved ones—from Maman and Gilberte to Mlle de Guermantes and Albertine—Françoise reemerges in

might cite momentous literary breakthroughs from the invention of Greek drama to the revolution of romantic poetics (e.g., Keats and Hölderlin) and the radical experiments in modernist fiction by authors like Joyce, Proust, and Woolf (explored in chapter 5). Greek tragedy reenvisions sacred stories of Gods and mortals with the benefit of poetic license. Tragedy—meaning “goat’s song” in Greek—was a repetition of the powerful Dionysiac rites of fusion and sacrifice in the poetic guise of